Why The Public Can No Longer Trust Academia

Most of us still believe academic credentials and publications have some intrinsic value. You see a citation – a bracketed name and date (Smith, 1983) or an authoritative looking little number (1) – and trust it to mean something. But what if it doesn’t?

We assume published papers are written by well-educated experts, and that the work is put through a rigorous peer review process. We assume the ideas have been critically analyzed by other experts in the field. That’s how this works, right?

Not exactly.

We are at a place today where viewpoints with no substance are taken as legitimate, solely because they emerge from the architecture of higher education. The consequence is that poor thinking and bad ideas have found their way into public discourse, news media, education, public policy and more.

The mechanism for this, it seems, is the iterative nature of academia itself. The process starts with an academic who has an idea that is somewhat novel, may contain some truth, but also contains some falsehood.

The idea may be wrapped in near-incomprehensible jargon, making it overly difficult or time consuming to criticize. It may be in line with the homogenous political persuasions of the field, so there is no opposition. Alternatively, opposition may be afraid to speak up for fear of going against the grain. Or perhaps other academics are simply too busy with their own work to take notice.

In any case, the bad idea is published and becomes part of the established literature. It is enshrined in academic legitimacy, making it available for others to draw on. Then another academic takes the idea – it’s published in a paper, after all – and iterates on it, creating some variant or an entirely new bad idea.

Now multiply that by hundreds of universities and thousands of individuals and publications, over decades. The result is a situation where entire fields of academic study are filled with complete nonsense.

There are countless examples like this, but that is enough to illustrate the point. Different academic fields have more or less finely tuned bullshit detectors, and some have none at all. The uncomfortable truth is that it is entirely possible to exist as a thinker at a highly respected institution while holding beliefs that are antithetical to reality.

This gets dark when it begins to affect the public and private sphere. Decisions with real consequence are made and justified with these bad ideas, because they carry with them the appearance of academic legitimacy.

See for example the recent controversy at Wilfrid Laurier University. A teaching assistant named Lindsay Shepherd showed a clip from public television that featured University of Toronto professor Jordan Peterson speaking about controversial Canadian legislation. Shepherd was accused by the university administration of being “transphobic” and committing “gender based violence”, in violation of Canadian law.

The only reason we know about this is because Shepherd secretly recorded the meeting with her superiors. You can hear excerpts in the video below, and there is a full recording embedded in this article.

The university has since issued an apology, but several people have countered this by speaking out against Shepherd.

Written by someone with a PhD: "I urge you to…demonstrate public support for Prof. Rambukkana and his brave stance against hate speech in the classroom."

PhD candidates and fully credentialed academics have called for Shepherd to apologize to trans people, and even blamed her for the incident. We live in strange times.

My guess is that a non-trivial number of smart, ambitious young people see what is happening and are avoiding universities like the plague. Nevertheless, most legitimate scientists and scholars still operate in university environments, and their work is some of the most valuable in the world.

But the public can no longer trust academia on its face, as a whole. Credentials and publications were once a reliable sign of intellectual honesty and rigorous scholarship, but this is no longer the case. Bad actors with bad ideas have contaminated the pool of knowledge and we need to adjust our filters accordingly.

Please don’t blindly accept credentials, publications or citations as signs of legitimacy. The opinion of an individual, even one with a PhD, is not the same as the results of an empirical study, and in fact may not be worth much at all. Do your own research!

This makes it look like my work is backed by legitimate research and scholarship. But that’s not necessarily true. ↵

John Elemans

Nice piece. The problem lies with post modernism. The question is, is it getting worse or better?

Actually, when I was a university student, I noticed that the answers we were supposed to provide on tests were to be found in a certain book, in a certain chapter, on a certain page, in a particular paragraph, in a specific sentence, and of course the book was the very one we were required to purchase, according to the class syllabus. Any answer at variance the the pre-program created a sense of consternation in the professors, who felt that the student was being insubordinate. That is not education, but indoctrination. That is not teaching students how to think independently, but that they are expected to engage in compliance. As far as scholarly journals and articles go, many of the authors who state that they have Master’s, Doctorate, Post Doctorate, or other qualifying credentials, often reveal a lack of logical, critical, and plain simple reasoning skills. It is not unusual, but common.

It isn’t all about ethnic studies or trans-queer feminist theory; I was reading advanced level in high school quite some time before all of that, in all likelihood above the level of my “teachers”. This left them looking and feeling very nervous and uncomfortable; their reaction was invariably to attempt to impeach my work and to openly question my comprehension of the material I was reading. I found it all incredibly offensive. Meanwhile, I might glance at the literature classmates were reading, easy “A” material which I had not seen or taken an interest in since I graduated the third grade, and that is the material which was encouraged senior year of high school.

Nick Jorgensen

While I enjoyed this post and believe that it made some valid points, I also think that there’s no small degree of bullshit here. While I don’t have much patience for the excesses and silliness of identity-politics-based scholarship, I also suspect that much of the opposition and criticism of that scholarship is motivated less by a commitment to free academic inquiry and more by a reactionary, misogynist, and/or racist agenda (which I am most assuredly not accusing you of holding, BTW). Full disclosure: I am a former academic (PhD, Political Science, Univ. of Michigan 2006) and have written, published, and reviewed journal articles and research proposals, so I have something of a (limited) insider’s perspective. The first problem: 1. Cherry-picking. In any field there’s a huge amount of crap; there’s no reason to believe that the 80/20 rule doesn’t apply to published academic work as well. By carefully choosing some examples of shit work, you’re making the argument that these papers are representative of their fields as a whole. It would be as if I issued a blanket condemnation of modern cinema by singling out the works of Adam Sandler and arguing that his crapola stood for all movies, or panning all literature based on a selective reading of Fifty Shades of Grey and The Da Vinci Code. 2. You seriously over-estimate the influence of academic research on the culture at large. Most of those crap articles you cite (e.g., the “Specters of Marx” gibberish) will be read eagerly by about twelve people, two of whom are first-degree blood relatives of the author. They will have no impact on mass media content, political competition, or public policy. The one exception, ironically, is the one social science field that has had meaningful influence on policy debates and policy formation and that is economics. There’s substantial cross-over between academic economics, policy-making, and larger culture, and that influence has been mostly negative. The 2007-08 economic crisis and market crash was worsened by the adoption of computationally complex and opaque economic models that had been developed in academia and employed by financial firms both large and small. The so-called Laffer Curve, which originated as a cocktail napkin doodle by academic economist Arthur Laffer (who had also helped author California’s Proposition 13, one of the first “tax revolt” initiatives and one that crippled California’s then world-class public university systems for years). The supply-side economics approach based on Laffer’s ideas have caused far more economic dislocation and policy failures than some obscure gibberish that name-checks Jacques Derrida. 3. A point related to the previous one: you completely ignore one of the most malign, destructive papers to emerge from peer-reviewed scientific journals. I’m referring to Dr. Arthur Wakefield’s 1998 paper in The Lancet that linked vaccines to autism in children. That paper, which was retracted in 2010 (something that nearly never happens in peer-reviewed research), has done more damage to public health than any other recent one that comes to mind. The anti-vaxxer idiocy that has seen an upsurge in childhood diseases that were once on the decline (measles and mumps, for instance) can be largely laid at the feet of this one paper that was conspicuously absent from your post. In fact, most of the jargon-laden, incomprehensible examples you cite seem to come from left/feminist authors, which suggests to me that your problem lies not with crappy academic writing and more with feminism in general. Finally, there’s an annoying baby-bathwater dynamic in this and similar posts in that you focus attention on the problems of the peer-review system (which do exist, of course; no human institution is perfect) without acknowledging its strengths. Peer review may not be perfect, but it is superior to the next-best alternative. Also, your argument that smart and ambitious young people are avoiding universities like the plague is absurd – top-ranked universities are still turning away far more applications than they receive, and the main reason that young people are avoiding universities may have more to do with the skyrocketing costs of a college education, and not because they are turned off by the specter of PC thought police. That specter seems to grow in power and influence the farther the observer’s mind wanders to the right. Students who are uninterested in the kind of work you hold up as emblematic of academia’s decline tend to sort themselves into other disciplines – no one is compelled to take courses on deconstruction or post-structuralism or feminist theory.

Some of your points I agree with, others I disagree with, and some I think are due to misunderstanding. Let me just preface this by saying that these are broad and complex issues and completely hashing them out in an online comments section is probably impossible. And second, this was not meant as an all-encompassing critique of academia, as that could take a whole book and this is a <1,000 word blog post. To respond to your points:

“Cherry-picking.”

Here you misunderstood the point of the article and/or it wasn’t clear. My point is that academic work tends not to be judged on its own merit but rather assigned legitimacy simply because it comes out of academia. This is especially a problem when it happens in the outside world and the work has influence. The use of those examples is not to claim the entire fields are bogus (although I probably would argue some are) but to make the point that assuming legitimacy based on credentials or publications is not a good heuristic.

“You seriously over-estimate the influence of academic research on the culture at large.”

This I disagree with. It’s not as if there is some invisible dividing line between academia and the rest of society – in fact it is quite the opposite. New knowledge is discovered in universities and propagates out into the rest of the world. Academics are consulted by political parties, companies, and other organizations. Academics also do not stay in academia their entire lives, they may leave to join the private sector, NGOs, think tanks, or work in politics. Think tanks in particular directly influence policy. Academia also influences education as theories of learning are developed by academics. Teachers are trained at universities and this has an impact on public education. In media, academics are regularly brought on to radio or television and consulted as experts in front of the general public. Public intellectuals tend to be academics and they influence culture. The *exact degree* of influence in all these cases (and others) is not obvious, but I think it’s clear there is some significant influence.

As for your points on economics, I don’t know enough about this to comment.

“Dr. Arthur Wakefield's 1998 paper in The Lancet”

I had not heard of this specific case and this was not deliberate omission.

“In fact, most of the jargon-laden, incomprehensible examples you cite seem to come from left/feminist authors, which suggests to me that your problem lies not with crappy academic writing and more with feminism in general.”

My problem is with poor thinking that is passed off as legitimate because it comes from the academic establishment and/or is in line with the “right” ideology. As I said in the article, there are countless more examples. And there’s no denying this is most widespread in disciplines like women’s studies, sociology, social work, communications studies, cultural anthropology and so on. These disciplines are also the most ideologically driven.

“Also, your argument that smart and ambitious young people are avoiding universities like the plague is absurd”

This is not an argument but as I said in the article a *guess*. It is a prospective claim about what I think will be a future trend if things in the universities do not change. Furthermore, the fact that top universities turn away more applications than they receive doesn’t even necessarily indicate this isn’t happening, because that data does not account for the people who aren’t applying at all.

“no one is compelled to take courses on deconstruction or post-structuralism or feminist theory”

This is true for some students, while for others these courses may be part of their degree requirements. But the ideas themselves have spread beyond individual courses into other areas of the humanities and social sciences, to such an extent that it is difficult for most non-STEM students to avoid them. They have also impacted student life more broadly, for example students living in residence will be put through sensitivity training, told about safe spaces, and so on.

One last point: If you finished your PhD in 2006, that means you completed your undergrad around 2000(?) I finished in 2014 and my sense is that even since then (less than 4 years) this has become more extreme. If you were in academia over 10 years ago it’s very possible things have shifted since then. There is actually pretty good evidence for increasing orthodoxy in the academy, even within the last 10 years: https://heterodoxacademy.org/problems/ And anecdotally, things do seem to have become more extreme in the past 5-10 years. The protests on campus, deplatforming of speakers, and all the high profile cases about this sort of thing are a fairly recent phenomenon.

It does seem to me that "answers" to these questions are in large part down to one's perception of the issues and so, like I said, it's probably impossible to find a resolution here. In any case, I do appreciate the long and well thought-out answer.

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